Book excerpt: A milestone in the published literature on the subject, this first-ever Handbook of Beta Distribution and Its Applications clearly enumerates the properties of beta distributions and related mathematical notions. It summarizes modern applications in a variety of fields, reviews up-and-coming progress from the front lines of statistical research and practice, and demonstrates the applicability of beta distributions in fields such as economics, quality control, soil science, and biomedicine. The book discusses the centrality of beta distributions in Bayesian inference, the beta-binomial model and applications of the beta-binomial distribution, and applications of Dirichlet integrals.